(Getty Images)
Russia’s promised diesel shipments will do little for the U.S. economy, but signal Moscow is ready to “sell out Iran,” former Treasury official Marshall Billingslea told Newsmax on Saturday.
Billingslea, a former special presidential envoy for arms control at the State Department and a former assistant Treasury secretary for terrorist financing, delivered the assessment on Newsmax’s “America Right Now,” a day after President Donald Trump announced a fuel arrangement with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s Truth Social post laid out the schedule: more than 300,000 tons immediately thereafter, 500,000 tons in November, and an additional 1 million tons after that, with 3 million more tied to the condition of Russian refineries.
CBS reported that the Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions to clear the sales, and that the Kremlin said Moscow was ready to supply oil and petroleum products to American and global markets.
“First of all, Putin doesn’t have the diesel to spare,” Billingslea said. “He actually had enacted a diesel export ban because Ukraine has knocked out around 40% of his diesel refining capacity.”
The Ukrainian outlet Kyiv Post has reported that Ukraine’s military claimed in July its strikes had forced 43% of Russia’s refining capacity offline, and that the resulting fuel crisis pushed Moscow into export bans.
He said the October shipment amounts to “less than a day’s worth of diesel for the United States,” a pledge he called “a nice symbolic measure.”
Ukraine condemned the move. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that “gifts to Putin will not bring peace or any benefit to the civilized world,” according to CBS.
“Iran economically is in a tailspin,” Billingslea said, crediting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the department and the U.S. Navy with “devastating the Iranian economy right now.”
Tehran has acknowledged the strain. Mohsen Rezaei, Iran’s No. 2 security official, called the current period among the hardest the country has faced, according to Iranian state media accounts reported by Colorado Politics, which also noted Bessent’s claim that Iran loaded no crude into tankers in September.
Asked how to end the U.S. war with Iran, after the host noted early claims that its nuclear capabilities lay buried under rubble, Billingslea rejected “half measures.” “It’s not a question of if; it’s when the fighting resumes,” he said. “We need to go for the throat.”
He urged Washington to adopt “the strategy the Israelis were pushing, which is strikes across Iran to cripple their repression apparatus,” and claimed officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “are actually taking second jobs now, because they’re not getting paid enough to make ends meet.”
“We need to further demoralize this repression apparatus, and we need to get guns in the hands of the Iranian people so that they can fight back for themselves,” he said.
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